This chapter broadens the scope in consideringLate style the novelist’s writing life to encompass literary autobiography as a distinct and stylistically innovative phase within the novelist’s career, which conventionally falls at its end. How do stylistic choices impact and transform the life narrative and its expressions of self-representation? Can novelists’ styles of autobiographical narration be compared? Does the textual rendering of the life spent writing warrant specific innovations in style? This chapter discusses these concerns by conceptualising Roth’s, Grass’s, and Coetzee’s autobiographical writings as a particular phase in their late work, focusing on Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), Roth’s The Facts (1988) and Deception (1990), as well as Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006). The fact that each of the authors turned to distinctly more overt forms of autobiographical narrative in the late phase of their careers provides a point of departure from which the specific choices in style that accompany this significant shift from fictional writing can be analysed fruitfully. The figure of the novelist who struggles through the autobiographical impulse by confronting themes of judgement, authorial voice and identity, memory and adequate self-representation emerges as a complex reference point which occupies the centre of a writing moment, the moment of late style.

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The Novelist and Late Style

  • Melissa Schuh

摘要

This chapter broadens the scope in consideringLate style the novelist’s writing life to encompass literary autobiography as a distinct and stylistically innovative phase within the novelist’s career, which conventionally falls at its end. How do stylistic choices impact and transform the life narrative and its expressions of self-representation? Can novelists’ styles of autobiographical narration be compared? Does the textual rendering of the life spent writing warrant specific innovations in style? This chapter discusses these concerns by conceptualising Roth’s, Grass’s, and Coetzee’s autobiographical writings as a particular phase in their late work, focusing on Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), Roth’s The Facts (1988) and Deception (1990), as well as Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006). The fact that each of the authors turned to distinctly more overt forms of autobiographical narrative in the late phase of their careers provides a point of departure from which the specific choices in style that accompany this significant shift from fictional writing can be analysed fruitfully. The figure of the novelist who struggles through the autobiographical impulse by confronting themes of judgement, authorial voice and identity, memory and adequate self-representation emerges as a complex reference point which occupies the centre of a writing moment, the moment of late style.